The Director’s Desk

November 2013

By WARREN WATSON, SABEW Executive Director
Kathleen Sebelius, the nation’s secretary of health and human services, flapped in the wind last week at a Washington congressional hearing about the early computer problems with the Affordable Care Act (ACA). She was under the gun, apologetic for early difficulties.
This is “miserably frustrating,” she said, taking “full responsibility” ...[Read More]

November 2012

By WARREN WATSON
Peter Watson coaxed, cajoled and challenged me through my first daily newspaper job in Gloucester, an enclave on the Northeast coast of Massachusetts.
He died the other day at 73, fighting a brain tumor to the very end on Boston’s North Shore.
He was an inspiration to me and many others who traversed the newsroom of his Gloucester Daily Times in the 1970s and 1980s. I ...[Read More]

January 2010

By WARREN WATSON, SABEW Executive Director
A West Coast newspaper editor called the other day.
“What should I do? My publisher wants to make cuts in our daily business section,” she said. “He wants to know why should have such a section. I really need some arguments. We’re cutting so much these days.”
We at SABEW have heard this lament numerous times in the last few ...[Read More]

October 2009

(SABEW executive director Warren Watson asked Monty Cook, editor of The Baltimore Sun, to comment on the business journalism achievements of Tim Wheatley, the Sun's business editor. Wheatley, a former SABEW member, was killed in a traffic accident outside Baltimore earlier in October.)
By Monty Cook
For much of his career Tim was a brilliant sports editor, and he understood what readers needed ...[Read More]

By Warren Watson
Tim Wheatley wanted to be become an FBI agent at one point in his 26-year journalism career. He settled on becoming one of the best editors around - in Minneapolis, in Indianapolis, and finally in Baltimore.
Wheatley was just beginning another stint in business journalism after creating award-winning sports sections at The Baltimore Sun, when he was killed Monday in a traffic ...[Read More]